4 ms·

I had the impression that cross-server algorithmic discovery is impossible given Mastodon's fundamental architecture. That made me lose interest in the project.

TaylorAlexander 4y ago
How so? If you optionally allow your server to coordinate with others, I don't see how anything like this could be impossible. Even still, some of the things I want - like giving priority to popular posts that would already be in my timeline but from several hours earlier - would be possible without any server to server coordination beyond standard federation.
- iudqnolq 4y ago
  I thought no instance has reliable, complete, cross-fediverse search. I thought no instance shows replies from across the fediverse. I've heard the protocol is too inefficient to support receiving everything.
  - TaylorAlexander 4y ago
    > I thought no instance has reliable, complete, cross-fediverse search. This is true. > I thought no instance shows replies from across the fediverse. I am not quite sure what you mean as I see replies from many different servers in the fediverse. Perhaps there are some replies I don't see, but I suppose then I would not know this. > I've heard the protocol is too inefficient to support receiving everything. This may limit some algorithmic features, but not everything. Servers could specifically make accessible their most popular posts of the day from users who consent to this in their settings. I could choose to subscribe to this list to be optionally sprinkled in to my algorithmic feed. I don't need to see every post on the fediverse for this to work. A good heuristic would be to subscribe to popular posts from every server that hosts one person I follow, and their could be some convenience function to select those servers for me. If I find that some servers are producing posts I don't care about, I could unsubscribe from that server in a little option under the algorithmically selected post. I may only want to see popular posts from something like 20 servers, and I might only want to see the top ten most popular posts from them each day. That seems like a tractable request from my server to the ones I am following, and it does not require full fediverse search.
    - iudqnolq 4y ago
      That makes sense. I guess it goes to show how different what different people want from social media is. I have no desire to see the most popular posts, I want to see unpopular posts relating to other unpopular posts I'm interested in. Most of the people I follow are people I don't know in real life who have less than a thousand followers but posts things I'm interested in, and I like how Twitter suggests new people to follow to me with similar characteristics. I would love the ability to tinker with my own recommendation algorithm, but I don't think I could build what I want without an index of the long tail. I also noticed that people I follow on Twitter aren't all on similar mastodon instances.
      - TaylorAlexander 4y ago
        > I guess it goes to show how different what different people want from social media is. Well showing popular posts was just one example. I am just thinking of things that can be implemented on mastodon without a full rewrite to create an index. > Most of the people I follow are people I don't know in real life who have less than a thousand followers but posts things I'm interested in, and I like how Twitter suggests new people to follow to me with similar characteristics. Sure, that's cool. Thinking about this for a minute, I feel like your server could do some social graph analysis of your history of likes combined with who you follow and who they follow to suggest people to follow who meet the criteria: you do not follow them, but people whose posts you like do follow them. I guess what I want to say is, I really feel like open social networks are an extremely important concept, and mastodon is the biggest one. Traction and networking effects are very important to make social networks survive. So rather than trying to build a full index on mastodon or build a new protocol that makes this easier, I really want to think about what is possible with mastodon today with simple changes. I believe that is a good path towards success. Certainly twitter's fully closed system is not what I want to rest on in perpetuity.
        iudqnolq 4y ago
        That's a good idea. I didn't think of walking out from direct follows. Maybe I'll try and implement that this weekend. Any pointers for getting started consuming mastodon data?

TaylorAlexander 4y ago

How so? If you optionally allow your server to coordinate with others, I don't see how anything like this could be impossible. Even still, some of the things I want - like giving priority to popular posts that would already be in my timeline but from several hours earlier - would be possible without any server to server coordination beyond standard federation.

iudqnolq 4y ago
I thought no instance has reliable, complete, cross-fediverse search. I thought no instance shows replies from across the fediverse. I've heard the protocol is too inefficient to support receiving everything.
- TaylorAlexander 4y ago
  > I thought no instance has reliable, complete, cross-fediverse search. This is true. > I thought no instance shows replies from across the fediverse. I am not quite sure what you mean as I see replies from many different servers in the fediverse. Perhaps there are some replies I don't see, but I suppose then I would not know this. > I've heard the protocol is too inefficient to support receiving everything. This may limit some algorithmic features, but not everything. Servers could specifically make accessible their most popular posts of the day from users who consent to this in their settings. I could choose to subscribe to this list to be optionally sprinkled in to my algorithmic feed. I don't need to see every post on the fediverse for this to work. A good heuristic would be to subscribe to popular posts from every server that hosts one person I follow, and their could be some convenience function to select those servers for me. If I find that some servers are producing posts I don't care about, I could unsubscribe from that server in a little option under the algorithmically selected post. I may only want to see popular posts from something like 20 servers, and I might only want to see the top ten most popular posts from them each day. That seems like a tractable request from my server to the ones I am following, and it does not require full fediverse search.
  - iudqnolq 4y ago
    That makes sense. I guess it goes to show how different what different people want from social media is. I have no desire to see the most popular posts, I want to see unpopular posts relating to other unpopular posts I'm interested in. Most of the people I follow are people I don't know in real life who have less than a thousand followers but posts things I'm interested in, and I like how Twitter suggests new people to follow to me with similar characteristics. I would love the ability to tinker with my own recommendation algorithm, but I don't think I could build what I want without an index of the long tail. I also noticed that people I follow on Twitter aren't all on similar mastodon instances.
    - TaylorAlexander 4y ago
      > I guess it goes to show how different what different people want from social media is. Well showing popular posts was just one example. I am just thinking of things that can be implemented on mastodon without a full rewrite to create an index. > Most of the people I follow are people I don't know in real life who have less than a thousand followers but posts things I'm interested in, and I like how Twitter suggests new people to follow to me with similar characteristics. Sure, that's cool. Thinking about this for a minute, I feel like your server could do some social graph analysis of your history of likes combined with who you follow and who they follow to suggest people to follow who meet the criteria: you do not follow them, but people whose posts you like do follow them. I guess what I want to say is, I really feel like open social networks are an extremely important concept, and mastodon is the biggest one. Traction and networking effects are very important to make social networks survive. So rather than trying to build a full index on mastodon or build a new protocol that makes this easier, I really want to think about what is possible with mastodon today with simple changes. I believe that is a good path towards success. Certainly twitter's fully closed system is not what I want to rest on in perpetuity.
      - iudqnolq 4y ago
        That's a good idea. I didn't think of walking out from direct follows. Maybe I'll try and implement that this weekend. Any pointers for getting started consuming mastodon data?